Almost all of the actions (buy, sell, offer, loan, upgrade office, etc.)

Database schema

Most of the game state summary post

Most of the action performed upon new turns

What's left to do:

Myth powers / current events

"Offer {items} to {god}" action

Myth powers section of game state post

Current prices section of game state post

Default on loan behavior

Database setup script

The myth powers are going to be the hardest thing to add, because they can pretty much alter any other action. For the loan default behavior, I'm not sure exactly what to put (there was some discussion of it last game, but it didn't ever happen).

Edit: None of it's tested yet, though, so it'll probably take quite a lot of debugging before its working properly

A test thread sounds good. I'll post it once I get the code to the point where it can fully run.

The myth powers that just change prices in a given region or for a given item would be pretty easy to implement. I might add just those ones and maybe also include some other mechanic (like travel time or supply and demand as you mentioned).

Do you have an idea how those mechanics might actually work, or are they just ideas that fit the theme?

Having items each be at a specific office and be moved around seems like it could be interesting, but I'm not sure how that would best be done without being too annoying or too different from the original.

It doesn't seem to be an intentional limit (no error message besides an HTTP 502), but I'm not sure what would cause that.

Edit: I was curious, so I installed phpbb on my computer and tested it myself. On my install the limit was 8174, so it seems to vary by some factor. Oddly enough, the cause is a segfault in the server process (probably the php subprocess)

faubiguy wrote:A test thread sounds good. I'll post it once I get the code to the point where it can fully run.

The myth powers that just change prices in a given region or for a given item would be pretty easy to implement. I might add just those ones and maybe also include some other mechanic (like travel time or supply and demand as you mentioned).

Do you have an idea how those mechanics might actually work, or are they just ideas that fit the theme?

Having items each be at a specific office and be moved around seems like it could be interesting, but I'm not sure how that would best be done without being too annoying or too different from the original.

Actually, I'm not sure if travel time would be a good idea, I liked the way time worked last time. But for supply and demand you could have each territory produce and consume goods (making sure that total production = total consumption for each good), and change prices according to some formula. For example: Roma produces 5 grain but consumes 20, and when it becomes negative (more demand than supply) the prices to sell grain to Roma increase a lot. Aegyptus produces 20 grain but consumes 5, so there it becomes more and more profitable to buy grain.

But I don't think it's necessary to include this if you include myth powers, it would make everything more complicated.

I have all of the bot code done now, so I just need to do the setup script and default database values (items, prices, offices, myth_powers, etc.). I'm going to be a bit busy tomorrow, but I should have a test thread up by Friday. Expect lots of bugs at first, of course, but after a bit of testing it should be ready to play a real game using some time next week.

Once I have everything done I'll put the code up on GitHub so people can reuse it and also help find bugs or submit changes if they're so inclined.

Sup guys! I'm on winter break so I'm anticipating having enough free time to devote to forum games for the next few weeks. I might disappear again around mid-January, though. You guys know I can never really quit you, though

I've been thinking of trying to implement a modified version of Seven Spies with free and open player-to-player messaging via PM/spoiler, and mod-posts roughly every 24 hours updating trades, door unlocks, and kills. Would anyone be interested in trying it out?

(I also definitely remember having some really cool ideas for a new science game, but I think that was like 1.5 to 2 years ago at this point so I doubt it'll happen)

thecamoninja wrote:I've been thinking of trying to implement a modified version of Seven Spies with free and open player-to-player messaging via PM/spoiler, and mod-posts roughly every 24 hours updating trades, door unlocks, and kills. Would anyone be interested in trying it out?

Yeah.

Also, did you take a look at the alias system that faubiguy/me were interested in using for this attempted iteration of the game? IIRC it was a way to to have open player-to-player messaging without being able to know who's communicating with who, but only 3 players signed up.

What I mean by "free and open player-to-player messaging via PM/spoiler" is that the players all take care of it themselves without any mod interaction. I might have free time, but I'm not really willing to devote as much as I used to to modding anymore, so I'm going for work-light games/variants . I think that a system using @player spoilers could work quite well, whereby players know who seems to be communicating with whom, but have no idea what's in the message. It would simply lead to a different sort of metagame. Alternatively, if you don't want people seeing who you talk to, there's always PMs. The one thing this systems eliminates is sending anonymous message, aliased messages, and messages impersonating other people. I know some players were pretty fond of that, but I was never necessarily attached to it.

I wouldn't be able to do it in time for this game, but for future ones I might be able to adapt the mercatores moderator bot to work for seven spies (which would handle all the sending messages back and forth, and keep track of which players have which keys, etc.).

My overall goal for the bot is to make the code extensible enough to write a plugin for handling any game (at least games that don't require human judgment to moderate), though that's more long term.

To me, receiving messages from people that weren't who they claimed and seeing the codes people came up with and stuff was a core part of Seven Spies. Though now that you mention it, this may have been a thing from the mod perspective (as spectator who can see everything going on) and not from the player perspective...

I agree that the duplicity was a big part of the game, and I do kind of wish there was a way to preserve it. The game I'm proposing would definitely end up very different from the original iterations, even if it were dressed up in the same flavor and stemming from the same concept. The problem was always just that it was a big pain in the ass from a mod's perspective to compile everything each round.

I'm of the opinion in general that games which require less mod involvement exhibit good design by definition (not that requiring a mod is bad design, but if you make a game that doesn't need one but retains some complexity then you've probably done a good job). The main problem is that it's very difficult to have true hidden information in a forum setting like this, there has to be one person who knows what's going on with everyone to make sure everything doesn't get fucked up (and to a lesser extent to keep people honest). I guess you could say this idea of cutting the mod out of communication between players comes from this design principle.

faubiguy wrote:I wouldn't be able to do it in time for this game, but for future ones I might be able to adapt the mercatores moderator bot to work for seven spies (which would handle all the sending messages back and forth, and keep track of which players have which keys, etc.)

A bot that was capable of doing the task would be awesome, and seven spies is certainly simpler to run that Mercatores in terms of variables to keep track of and commands available to players.

██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████"Therefore it is in the interests not only of public safety but also public sanity if the buttered toast on cats idea is scrapped, to be replaced by a monorail powered by cats smeared with chicken tikka masala floating above a rail made from white shag pile carpet."

Okay, so I was going to create the game, but I rather make sure there's interest in this...

So the idea is to create an RPG based on the Harvest Moon series, so you plant vegetables and fruit and take care of a farm and stuff, and roleplay with the townsfolk and stuff. A core element of the game is to woo certain people on the town and get a partner, possibly marrying them and stuff... though I guess this part is optional, it was a core part of the series.

Open questions are if the players all manage a farm as a team (so, say, one player can tend the crops while another goes to dig for gold to the mine and stuff) or if each player would have their own farm.

I could probably also implement quests and stuff if what the players want is killing monsters and fighting evil, but it's interesting to see if some other concept could help better to have a story-driven game.

I'd prefer something inbetween: players can either have a farm on their own, or join up with other players to work together. It's probably a minority opinion, though. You could have a poll/vote in the sign-ups thread.

██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████"Therefore it is in the interests not only of public safety but also public sanity if the buttered toast on cats idea is scrapped, to be replaced by a monorail powered by cats smeared with chicken tikka masala floating above a rail made from white shag pile carpet."

It'll steal the concept of families from Lawrencelot's Vendetta but with farms (i.e. at the beginning you may join 1 out of 3 farms, and after they're filled up, new players may create a fourth farm and so on - so players can play cooperatively by joining the same farm or competitively by joining different ones.)

As a co-mod you wouldn't be able to play, but would be able to provide situations and dialog for the NPCs (and, actually, I think we'd benefit if the co-mod was female, so she could gain control of all female NPCs, while I'd control the male ones) - and I also need the system I'm going to implement to make sure it's not too complex and it's fun for the benefit of all players.